“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.” - Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Learn this from the waters:in mountain clefts and chasms,loud gush the streamlets,but great rivers flow silently.- Sutta Nipata 3.725

Sylvester wrote:His forthcoming work (with Bucknell) on the translation of the complete Madhyama Agama from Chinese to English would be a fantastic supplement to this present work.

Keep your eyes peeled. 2012 should be a bumper year, what with Vol 1 of the said translation scheduled for print, as well as BB's AN translation.

What would really be nice, in addition to translating the Chinese stuff, is if the Tibetan Agama material would also be translated. It is a shame that the Tibetan opted not to include a full Agama collection in their Kangyur, but there is, nonetheless, a fair amount of material just waiting to be translated, and I would hope it would be done along the lines of Lamotte's translations.

This being is bound to samsara, kamma is his means for going beyond. -- SN I, 38.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” HPatDH p.723

>> Do you see a man wise[enlightened/ariya]in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.<<-- Proverbs 26:12

Just scanning the correspondences tables at Sutta Central, I get the feel that the known Tibetan parallels to the Nikayas is pretty thin. Maybe more work needs to be done.

Even then, Ajahn Sujato mentioned once that when the "Agama" sutra authorities from the Abhidharmakosa were examined, they did not quite match the Agama sutras that have been preserved in the Chinese. Was Vasubandhu perhaps working with sutras that have evolved further after the Chinese Agamas closed?

It's a loss for the Tibetans that they don't have access to the old texts. Until more Tibetan monastics catch up with the Chinese and Japanese counterparts with solid comparative Buddhism degrees, they are just going to perpetuate the silly Gelug mythologies about the textual traditions a la "Maps of the Profound". But then again, even if armed with a PhD, would a Tibetan monastic dare disavow such a historiography that is entrenched in the tradition of Vows?